


a girl with six wings

by velavelavela



Category: H.I.V.E. Series - Mark Walden
Genre: Angels, Childhood Trauma, Dissociation, Experimental Style, Fantober 2020, Kinda?, Lowercase, Magical Realism, late lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:20:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27195019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velavelavela/pseuds/velavelavela
Summary: she did not know exactly where she came from, but she knew she had six wings feathered in black and dark purples and greens. she knew that it rained diamonds on jupiter because one time she stole a magazine when space travel was trendy. she knew that russia was cold in the winter and a gun didn’t take that long to reload when you knew what you were doing.fantober2020 day 22: demon/angel (loosely)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	a girl with six wings

I

she had never quite noticed herself in reflection, or rather, she had decided since she was very little not to pay attention to the windows and lakes she glided by. so when dimitri said “don’t take this the wrong way but you look like you’re covered in gasoline” she didn’t know what he was talking about. until she saw herself in the glasshouse communal bathroom mirror, unlashing her wings and letting them twitch outward for the first time in a long while. they unfurled like tongues.

sometimes, she blocked out things that she didn’t want to remember, and when they came back to her, triggered by the feeling of a cloth or the taste of snap peas, she saw them through a filter of blinding light and intense ringing in her ears, like church bells, or thunder.

she smelled the fumes of a car on a hot summer day and regressed--

“gasoline,” she’d replied, “huh.”

sometimes she wanted to coat the world in the stuff and drop a match.

II

and maximilian nero drank his coffee black, and when she stood by the doorway with one leg taking her weight and the other resting on tiptoes like a crane, he asked her if she wanted some, he imported his coffee from a cruelty free farm somewhere in south america.

she politely declined.

III

she did not know exactly where she came from, but she knew she had six wings feathered in black and dark purples and greens. she knew that it rained diamonds on jupiter because one time she stole a magazine when space travel was trendy. she knew that russia was cold in the winter and a gun didn’t take that long to reload when you knew what you were doing.

an older man called her an angel once so she suffocated him with her wings.

one evening she screamed into a pillow in her room at H.I.V.E., screamed so loud, so shrill. she screamed for what felt like twenty years. she screamed and she didn’t know why. but, nobody came to check on her, crouched on the floor with her face buried as a self-inflicting desdemona. nero had given her a leash of privacy.

IV

the first time furan hit her was when dimitri tried to knock her down and she caught herself with her wings, skidding a few steps backwards. the sun haloed behind dimitri’s head like a byzantine portrait, his mouth twitched up into a private smile, and she was grateful.

“attack me, quickly.”

she did, trying to keep their friendship intact, aiming for his middle.

“WHAT WAS THAT? HIT HIM!”

the man loomed over the two of them, casting a bloody shadow three times as tall. his eyes shone like rubies, his arms were the size of branches. she fought at dimitri again, this time trying more earnestly.

“I SAID HIT HIM, NOT PECK AT HIM LIKE A RAVEN PECKING AT A CORPSE. AGAIN!”

she tried again, hyper aware of furan’s eyes boring like maggots into her.

“STILL IT IS PECK, PECK, PECK.”

she dug her fingernails into crescent moons on her palms, stomping her feet once, squeezing her eyes shut in frustration,

“i’m trying!”

when he hit her, she couldn’t even catch herself. she flew, tumbled, and skinned her elbows. she tasted rubles in her mouth and when she spit onto the cobblestone, alongside saliva bubbles was red.

“HOW DARE YOU RAISE YOUR VOICE TO ME.”

her wings threatened to encompass her, cocoon her into something dark and safe, but they did not, she made sure of it. instead she got up and fought dimitri for the rest of their five minutes with a stinging tongue.

V

one evening after a shower she stood naked in her bathroom. she had positioned the full-length mirror normally by her closet behind her so that she could see her back. the skin was taut over the knuckles of her spine, the wings connecting to her along the stem. she found that, after years of keeping them away from cold and rain and other situations where they’d just be a nuisance, it didn’t hurt to have them compressed for hours on end. even when nero said she could let them out, she would rather not. she was used to having them folded like silken shirts and tucked neatly beneath her clothing.

she looked at the way the feathers ticked into her skin. she was so, so tired.

VI

later when her formative years were enveloped in static and white noise, she met otto malpense and saw herself, in an odd backwards way. she took him and wing fanchu to tokyo for the latter’s father’s funeral, a mundane and straightforward mission, save for keeping a sharp eye on malpense, which she did, and left, and came back, and wing was killed, and otto was heartsick, and raven flung herself off the building and caught most of the momentum with her wings.

VII

when she saw him again she felt like dying. when he came to her cell she felt like dying. his teeth were sharp as stained glass when he sneered, just as she remembered. most of her childhood was blank, but the memory of the escape came back, that time she was running shindeep through hot-cold snow in the siberian tundra, chased by dogs. a man can be a gun, she decided, and a gun can be a man. she took his eye out, he took her upper left wing and jaw and her slender frame back to the glasshouse, where she felt like puking and crying and killing the doctors that treated her, but she did none of those things. instead, she let herself drift into the space where she didn’t need to think.

VIII

she never exactly went into detail with nero about what happened there.

IX

there were moments when she wondered if she could lift off completely, like when she was little. aim as high as possible and escape the hell that was earth. there was a moment after anastasia’s first death, in the helicopter explosion, when raven sobbed on the ground because she felt so wrong so wrong so wrong, she felt little pieces of snow embed into her hair and she released her wings to their full potential and in that moment all of existence fled down her throat, choking her like hair. the world shattered and the pieces were sharp as she tried to swallow them. her body held so much pain, so much beauty, so when she said goodbye to the woman she knew she was saying goodbye not only to her abuser but also to anastasia’s mental raven, the self that raven would tackle some day, far in the future. the self that disappeared when anastasia’s consciousness did. the girl seen through those deceivingly honeyed eyes. a natalya that once was. a girl with six wings.

**Author's Note:**

> the concept of this fic is kinda inspired by "a very old man with enormous wings" by gabriel garcía márquez, so if you havent read that it's v short and v good. i also sort of wanted to play with magical realism within h.i.v.e. but idk man. i may mess with this concept some more in the future but yknow!!! thanks 4 reading


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